Adolescents' Reactions to the Evacuation of the Sinai Settlements: A Longitudinal Study

This study investigated psychological reactions of adolescents to a severe stress situation—the evacuation of the Sinai settlements. The research focused on emotional reactions of anxiety and anger to this stress situation. Two central problems were investigated: (a) The intensity of the emotional responses of anxiety and anger of the adolescents to the stress situation, before and after the evacuation, and (b) the impact of three intervening variables on these emotional reactions—cognitive perception of the political situation, family functioning, and personality characteristics. Data for this study were collected in a regional high school in Israel from 418 pupils in 9th through 12th grades. Seventy-eight of the pupils lived in the Yamit area. Measurements were obtained at three points in time: 6 weeks and 1 week before the evacuation and 2 months after it. The results supported the predicted trend that adolescents in the Yamit group before the evacuation would score higher on state anxiety and state anger than would those in the comparison group. Two months after the evacuation there was a significant drop in those scores. The trait measures remained stable in both groups and no significant differences were found between the two groups on these scores. Concerning the impact of the three intervening variables on the intensity of the state emotional responses, the results did not support any of the hypotheses.     

An Elementary Syllabus of Psychological Tests

The purpose of this study was to examine the universality of the “inverse square root law” insofar as it purports to show a constant relationship between emotional involvement and subjectively perceived geographical distance. It was argued that the square root exponent in the “law” was derived from experiments that used a limited range of stimuli (place names). With students as subjects, two experiments were conducted in order to discover the relationship between emotional involvement and subjective distance when both very close and very distant places were considered. It was shown that the inverse square root function was not constant but rather varied with the range of stimuli.     

Gender, Religion, and the Experience of Suffering: A Case Study

This article explores how gender and religious belief come together in an elderly woman’s experience of suffering. It is based on qualitative research that explored experiences of suffering in a group of community-dwelling elders (80+) living in a North American city. We use the case study method to introduce themes that show suffering’s uniqueness to the individual whose narrative we report, as well as similarity to themes that emerged in other participants’ narratives. In this case, an elderly woman’s gender and religious identities merge in her stories of suffering, which include the memory of a childhood disability and an incident of clergy abuse that occurred 70 years previously. A key finding in this paper is that key themes in her story of suffering, which are disablement and clergy abuse, resonate to the general themes of suffering found in our study, which are (1) threats to personal identity; (2) loss of a valued item, quality, or relationship; and (3) a lack of control over self or the circumstances of life.     

Perceived Powerlessness as a Mediator between Life Stressors and Deviant Behaviors

ABSTRACT

The Threat Appraisal and Coping Theory suggest that when facing life stressors, individuals may perceive that they are powerless to change them, which may prompt “maladaptive coping” deviant behaviors. The present study examined the relationship between 5 types of deviant behavior and perceived powerlessness, and whether powerlessness served as a mediator between life stressors and deviance. Money stress and powerlessness increased risk for watching porn, cross-dressing, hoarding, and medication misuse. Work stress and powerlessness significantly increased risk for watching porn, cross-dressing, and medication misuse. Family stress and powerlessness increased risk for watching porn, cross-dressing, disordered eating, hoarding, and medication misuse.     

Knowing That P without Believing That P

Most epistemologists hold that knowledge entails belief. However, proponents of this claim rarely offer a positive argument in support of it. Rather, they tend to treat the view as obvious and assert that there are no convincing counterexamples. We find this strategy to be problematic. We do not find the standard view obvious, and moreover, we think there are cases in which it is intuitively plausible that a subject knows some proposition P without—or at least without determinately—believing that P. Accordingly, we present five plausible examples of knowledge without (determinate) belief, and we present empirical evidence suggesting that our intuitions about these scenarios are not atypical.     

Mathematical symbols as epistemic actions

Recent experimental evidence from developmental psychology and cognitive neuroscience indicates that humans are equipped with unlearned elementary mathematical skills. However, formal mathematics has properties that cannot be reduced to these elementary cognitive capacities. The question then arises how human beings cognitively deal with more advanced mathematical ideas. This paper draws on the extended mind thesis to suggest that mathematical symbols enable us to delegate some mathematical operations to the external environment. In this view, mathematical symbols are not only used to express mathematical concepts??they are constitutive of the mathematical concepts themselves. Mathematical symbols are epistemic actions, because they enable us to represent concepts that are literally unthinkable with our bare brains. Using case-studies from the history of mathematics and from educational psychology, we argue for an intimate relationship between mathematical symbols and mathematical cognition.     

Memory as discrimination: What distraction reveals

Recalling information involves the process of discriminating between relevant and irrelevant information stored in memory. Not infrequently, the relevant information needs to be selected from among a series of related possibilities. This is likely to be particularly problematic when the irrelevant possibilities not only are temporally or contextually appropriate, but also overlap semantically with the target or targets. Here, we investigate the extent to which purely perceptual features that discriminate between irrelevant and target material can be used to overcome the negative impact of contextual and semantic relatedness. Adopting a distraction paradigm, it is demonstrated that when distractors are interleaved with targets presented either visually (Experiment 1) or auditorily (Experiment 2), a within-modality semantic distraction effect occurs; semantically related distractors impact upon recall more than do unrelated distractors. In the semantically related condition, the number of intrusions in recall is reduced, while the number of correctly recalled targets is simultaneously increased by the presence of perceptual cues to relevance (color features in Experiment 1 or speaker’s gender in Experiment 2). However, as is demonstrated in Experiment 3, even presenting semantically related distractors in a language and a sensory modality (spoken Welsh) distinct from that of the targets (visual English) is insufficient to eliminate false recalls completely or to restore correct recall to levels seen with unrelated distractors . Together, the study shows how semantic and nonsemantic discriminability shape patterns of both erroneous and correct recall.     

Brief pitch-priming facilitates infants’ discrimination of pitch-evoking noise: Evidence from event-related potentials

Pitch is derived by the auditory system through complex spectrotemporal processing. Pitch extraction is thought to depend on both spectral cues arising from lower harmonics that are resolved by cochlear filters in the inner ear, and on temporal cues arising from the pattern of action potentials contained in the cochlear output. Adults are capable of extracting pitch in the absence of robust spectral cues, taking advantage of the temporal cues that remain. However, recent behavioral evidence suggests that infants have difficulty discriminating between stimuli with different pitches when resolvable spectral cues are absent. In the current experiments, we used the mismatch negativity (MMN) component of the event related potential derived from electroencephalographic (EEG) recordings to examine a cortical representation of pitch discrimination for iterated rippled noise (IRN) stimuli in 4- and 8-month-old infants. IRN stimuli are pitch-evoking sounds generated by repeatedly adding a segment of white noise to itself at a constant delay. We created IRN stimuli (delays of 5 and 6 ms creating pitch percepts of 200 and 167 Hz) and high-pass filtered them to remove all resolvable spectral pitch cues. In experiment 1, we did not find EEG evidence that infants could detect the change in the pitch of these IRN stimuli. However, in Experiment 2, after a brief period of pitch-priming during which we added a sine wave component to the IRN stimulus at its perceived pitch, infants did show significant MMN in response to pitch changes in the IRN stimuli with sine waves removed. This suggests that (1) infants can use temporal cues to process pitch, although such processing is not mature and (2) that a short amount of pitch-priming experience can alter pitch representations in auditory cortex during infancy.